Memories and lessons remain as Florida's treacherous hurricane season comes to an end

Dan Scanlan

Thursday

Nov 30, 2017 at 5:06 PM

Ella Aquilla doesn’t need the National Weather Service to tell her this year’s Atlantic hurricane season was the worst since 2012 with 19 hurricanes and tropical storms.

Work to repair damage from the black, gasoline-tainted flood waters that flowed almost hip-high into her Jacksonville home from Sept. 10-11’s Hurricane Irma was just completed, while homes near hers a block off the St. Johns River still await renovations.

The hurricane was the first she experienced, watching the flood invade her home from a second-floor window.

“The water came up about a foot and a half inside, so there was no difference between the river and front door. It came about this high, and there’s three steps to the front door,” Aquilla said as she raised a hand about 5 feet off the ground.

The hurricane season officially ended Thursday. Irma was the monster in the middle — a Category 5 storm at one point that lived for 13 days and ultimately flooded much of Northeast Florida’s St. Johns River coastline and tributaries. Hundreds of homes and businesses were soaked with river water and mud.

“For us, it is the worst hurricane season ever,” said Andy Zarka, owner of European Street Cafe at 1704 San Marco Blvd.

Contractors have stripped the restaurant to the beams as they fix damage caused by almost 2 feet of river water when Irma struck.

“This building never flooded and it certainly never flooded in the years we had it,” Zarka said. “We sandbagged. We did what we thought was prudent and tried to be prepared. I don’t know if any level of sandbagging would have helped. It came through the window frames.”

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FEARS PREDICTED

The severity of this year’s hurricane season was predicted early by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which said it would be “above average” with 11 to 17 named storms. The season, which officially started June 1, made the records books for another reason — the most expensive ever, with $202.6 billion in damages. That includes the costs tallied in damages when Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast and Texas, then Irma in Florida and the Caribbean islands, and Maria, whose effects are still being felt in Puerto Rico.

For comparison, the 2012 season also had 19 storms, two that crossed through or just south of Northeast Florida. Last year’s hurricane season was also violent with 16 storms, the first tracked in January, the last in late November, according to the National Hurricane Center at nhc.noaa.gov. It included 2016’s Hurricane Matthew that passed 55 miles east of Mayport, flooding downtown St. Augustine and parts of Jacksonville’s beaches in the process.

The last time the area had that close a brush with hurricanes and tropical storms was 2004 when four of that seasons’s 16 hurricanes socked Jacksonville causing massive flooding, tornadoes and days of power outages.

Of course, while the prediction was for a severe 2017 season, no one could say where those storms would go, said Al Sandrick, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Jacksonville. He said studies predicted a La Nina situation with cooler-than-average sea water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which favors tropical storm development, coupled with “very warm water” that feeds storm development in the Atlantic Ocean.

“There have been other seasons when we have been above average and they stayed out to sea,” Sandrick said. “Two things we did not realize was the impacts to land would be because there is no forecast for landfall on a seasonal basis and no one ever saw the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. We saw that before in 1993. But no one knew for sure there would be that many major hurricanes in the basin.”

Duval County Emergency Management Director Steve Woodard said the city was well aware of the predictions, putting out warnings and preparation advice at JaxReady.com in advance of Irma. He said the predictions were accurate, and the city used that information to prepare with a Weather Service forecaster in the operations center to advise their response.

“With Irma we started having briefings almost two weeks before it approached our coast,” Woodard said, with the city eventually deciding to order evacuations. “This was the greatest, most significant flooding since 1846, but we prepare year-round for storms and other incidents.”

Unfortunately, people tend to only look at the severity of storms within their lifespans, forgetting epic hurricane hits like Dora in September 1964, Sandrick said. While many of this year’s bad storms stayed out to sea or missed the Florida peninsula, Irma was historically one of the worst with winds 20 mph higher than anticipated.

“From an historical point of view as far as the inundation that occurred on the St. Johns River, that is the greatest we have seen since the October 1846 hurricane, which looked very similar to Irma as it came across Florida,” Sandrick said. “It was more than what we saw with Dora. That said, as far as Irma or Matthew, neither one are close to as bad as it could be if we took a bad hit from a major hurricane coming in off the Atlantic Ocean. I fully understand the suffering that occurred with Irma. But the fact is we still got lucky with both Irma and Matthew.”

SLIDESHOWS

Photos: First look at Irma's flooding, damage across Jacksonville

Photos: Historic flooding hits Jacksonville's historic Riverside

Photos: Jacksonville's Southbank, San Marco swamped after Irma

Photos: Urban water rescues, beaches cleanup in Irma's wake

Photos: A bird's-eye view of Irma's wrath on Jacksonville

Photos: Hurricane Irma leaves beaches in the dark and in a mess

DAMAGES AND AID

The damages caused by Irma are still being felt two months later in areas such as San Marco, where some storefronts and homes remain boarded up even as Christmas decorations hang from nearby streetlights and fences. Many homes have temporary storage pods in their driveways.

Uprooted trunks and roots of fallen trees are still in abundance. And along the riverfront seawall on River Road, part of the street has been closed as crews repair storm damage that shattered some of the concrete.

“I know a lot of people suffered damages they are still dealing with, but it could have been worse,” Woodard said. “… People need to heed the advice and orders especially when we have warnings. I think they did heed that. But flooding to the extent we saw it is a rare occurrence.”

By the numbers, Irma impacted 65,755 square miles of Florida, from Key West in the south to Pensacola on the west end of the Panhandle and Jacksonville on the east coast. People in 48 of the state’s 67 counties were eligible to apply for help under Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Individual Assistance program. So far at least 2.6 million Florida households have contacted FEMA for help and received about $1.5 billion. Of that, about $900 million has gone to homeowners and renters whose insurance or other forms of disaster assistance could not meet their disaster-caused needs.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $615.9 million Tuesday to help hard-hit areas in Florida recover from Irma. The grant comes through HUD’s Disaster Recovery Program to support the repair of damaged homes, businesses and critical infrastructure in the state. The money will go to the 830,788 claims of damage from Irma filed statewide by insurers as of Nov. 13, almost 34,000 of those in Duval County, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation reported. Another 3,627 claims were filed in Nassau, with 9,399 in St. Johns and 2,875 in Putnam.

The total estimated insured losses amounted to almost $5.9 billion, with 317,389 claims (just over 64 percent) paid and closed.

Most affected regionally were those who lived and worked along the St. Johns River and its tributaries, certainly those in downtown Jacksonville, San Marco and Riverside, Sandrick said. The forecasts were “right on,” he said. But inland counties along the river also were affected by storm surge, what he called “the most life-threatening aspect of any storm” that kills about 80 percent of anyone who dies in a hurricane or tropical storm.

”Further down the St. Johns we got more water trapped than we anticipated,” he said. “Along the oceanfront, we were a bit low with the storm surge forecast, but within the ballpark. Irma wasn’t just Irma. There was an absolutely local nor’easter that built in ahead of Irma and pushed the water further down than we had anticipated.”

Irma racked up another statistic on the state’s waterways, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Cleanup and removal of wrecked ships continues in Florida waterways, with 1,968 displaced vessels removed as of Monday as work now shifts toward Florida’s east coast. That included the removal of the 68-foot fishing vessel Swamp Fox on the Trout River near the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens.

As for next year’s season and the ones after that, Woodard suggested residents remember this year.

“We always remind people it only takes one hurricane,” he said. “You need to prepare year round, and seven months from now we will be reminding people again.”

And it could happen again, Sandrick said.

“Certainly this type of season is possible again, and it is just the cycle of hurricanes,” he said. “If we go back in history, we can point to epic seasons in the past. This occurs and is just part of the cycle. There will be another 2017 season again at some point. It may be 20 or 30 years. You need to treat every season the same. It doesn’t matter if we forecast above or below. Treat that this may be the year we could get struck.”

Dan Scanlan: (904) 359-4549

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